Harry Muir always wanted baseball to be his full-time profession. That started years ago, when he was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays out of high school and pitched three years professionally in their minor league system from 1991-1994 before heading overseas. Thirty years later, he’s circled back to that dream by opening a new baseball facility called ‘The Cage.’ “This is allowing me to do baseball full time,” said Muir. Currently he wears several hats. He owns his own construction firm, is the general manager of the CBL’s Chatham-Kent Barnstormers and coaches the Fanshawe Falcons of the OCAA. “Now I’ll be here all winter, going to C-K [Chatham-Kent] for the summer, and then I have college in the fall. I’m doing baseball 12 months a year and it’s fantastic,” said Muir. The Cage features two full-time batting cages with high-end ‘hack attack’ pitching machines and a flex space beside which can be configured to two-cages, or a turf surface for infield or pitching practice. “This just shows the baseball community in London is growing,” said Eric Pettipiece, a Londoner who pitches for the Barnstormers of the CBL. He added, “With the [Toronto Blue] Jays going on that postseason run, it’s probably anticipated that there’s going to be more and more kids that are wanting to go and get into baseball. There’s always a need for people to get work in, in the off season or rainy days.” Pettipiece recognizes the huge demand for off-season training and thinks there is a need for more facilities. Currently some of the local teams like the Great Lake Canadians and London Badgers have their own facilities which are available to the public, but many of the time is used for their own teams. “I’m not trying to compete with those guys because I’m not I’m setting up elite teams,” said Muir. “This is always open to everybody. Centre Field [Sports] is great and we’ve all we’ve all benefited from all the stuff they’ve done but they have so many teams they take up a lot of time up and I’m trying to fill I those gaps. I want to I’m going to serve the other 95 per cent that are playing baseball for fun.” Muir started this dream about eight years ago, and now that everything has aligned, he took possession of the building on Dec. 18 and started getting to work. “I want to serve the whole genre of everybody from Byron minor baseball to Fanshawe College guys to high school baseball to professional. We don’t have a lot of options in London, and I think I’m just I’m just kind of filling a need,” he said.
